The increased cultivation of currants created a greater need for wooden commodities such as stakes to support the vines and crates and barrels to transport cargo. If these came from locally grown timber, deforestation would have been linked to currant cultivation in this way, as well. The degree of deforestation is a difficult thing to measure. To determine the degree and scale of deforestation, more research would need to be done to reconstruct the historical landscapes of the Peloponnese. Grove and Rackham caution against the supposition by scholars that deforestation occurred based only on evidence that trees were being cut down. It must also be proved that trees were being cut down faster than they were replaced.The nineteenth-century boom in Mediterranean commercial agriculture was not just a phenomenon of low-lying plains. Cultivators throughout Greece also transformed hills and mountainous landscapes through the construction of terraces in order to sustain intensive, commercial agriculture. Terraces were built on the slopes of hills to create more surface area on which crops could be grown, and they also retained moisture in the soil which made arid climates more suitable for cultivation. Most of the terraces seen in Greece today were constructed during this time to suit the needs of export agriculture.On the Ottoman Aegean islands, for example,raspberry cultivation pot terracing expanded during this time to sustain intensive, commercial olive cultivation.
As olive oil and the soap it was used to make became the main exports of the island of Lesvos, olive production intensified and terraces reached up into the mountains.In the western Peloponnese, terraces were sometimes used to plant currant vineyards along hillsides, as booming demand from France and the UK made this seem like a sound investment. In Messenia in the southern Peloponnese, they were also constructed to plant tree crops, especially figs.38Where the extension of vineyards was constrained by a lack of arable land, local elites bought up uncultivated plots, consolidated large estates, and contracted tenant farmers to clear and plow the land and plant vineyards.If uncultivated land was marshy, as was often the case in the low-lying plains of the Peloponnese, landowners contracted workers to drain the land and dig ditches for irrigation.We can see how this worked in Ilia after the 1871 land reform act. Local elites took advantage of the land reform act to consolidate large estates. However, much of the land was not ready for cultivation, so these elites entered into planting agreements with peasant farmers. Planting agreements allowed peasant farmers to live rent-free on the landlord’s land for an agreed-upon amount of time, provided that they drained it and planted vineyards. At the end of the contract, having colonized and planted all of the landlord’s plot, the peasant farmers would then be given a segment of that land.Two cases from Pirgos, as elaborated by Alexis Franghiadis, help to illustrate how this worked. After the 1871 land reform law, Th. Palailiou, a lawyer from Pirgos, purchased 240 contiguous stremmas. He then entered into a planting agreement with three peasant families from the mountainous regions of Mantineia and Kalavrita. Palailiou ceded 181 stremmas of this estate to these peasant families and offered them interest-free loans for five years.
During this time, as Franghiadis writes, “They were obliged to plant the land with currant vines and to construct the threshing-floors necessary for the drying of the currants.” After five years, these families would pay back the loans, they would get to keep half of the land and threshing floors, and they would return the other half to Palailiou.Similar arrangements were made by A. Dalianis, mayor of Pirgos. He ceded 130 stremmas to peasant families from Mantinea. These peasants added to the value of their owners’ land through their labor. As a result, they received land of their own, but they would have had to seek other sources of credit and sell some land in order to subsist for the years they were working to make land suitable for currant cultivation.Messenia comprises the southwestern corner of the Peloponnesian peninsula, bordered by the Taygetos Mountains in the east, the Alfeios River in the north, the Messenian Gulf in the south, and the Ionian Sea in the west. Messenia is an interesting case study for the effects of commercial agriculture on the landscape of Greece because, over the years, Messenia has been associated with several different commodities. In and around the city of Kalamata, silk was an important export commodity throughout the nineteenth century and well into the twentieth century. Raw silk was mostly sent to France, but a large amount was also processed locally. The French demand for silk grew in the second half of the nineteenth century, and in the 1850s, silk production in Kalamata relocated from households to factories. In 1853, a French company, Fournaire & Cie., opened the first mechanical silk factory in Kalamata. In 1859, a British company, Fels & Co., which also operated a winery in Patras, opened the second silk factory in Kalamata, and beginning in 1870 it was powered by a steam engine.By the 1870s, Kalamata was the main producer of silk in Greece. There were six silk spinneries in the city employing 400 Greek workers—mainly women and children working 10-hour days for 1 drachma per day—and together they produced 1.5 million drachmas worth of silk annually.
Demand for silk declined after World War I, and Kalamata’s last silk factory closed in 1930.46 In the latter half of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth century, Messenia was also well known for its figs. Figs have been an important crop in the Mediterranean for centuries, long valued for their versatility. Fig trees are easy to grow, they grow on land where other crops will not—hills, mountains, plains, and all types of soil—and they mix well with other crops, such as vines and olives. They are high in caloric content, are useful as a sweetener, and are much less land-intensive than sugar cane. Fig leaves are useful as animal fodder, and they were collected every autumn to be used for this purpose. Figs became an important export crop in Messenia beginning around 1860. Messenian figs were dried and exported to Austria-Hungary, Russia, Germany, and others, where in addition to being consumed in pastries and deserts, they were roasted and used to make fig coffee—a coffee substitute or additive that was particularly popular in Central Europe in the nineteenth century—or they could be macerated into spirits. By 1916, almost half of the 2 million fig trees in the Kingdom of Greece were located in the plains of Messenia, mostly in the demes of Pamisou and Oixalía, in the hinterland of Kalamata.At the end of the nineteenth century, for a very short period of time, Messenia also became a very important currant-growing region. In the first half of the nineteenth century,low round pots currants were primarily grown around the Gulf of Corinth and on the Ionian Islands to meet the British demand for dried fruits for their puddings. Currant cultivation spread to Messenia in the 1870s and 1880s during the phylloxera crisis in Europe .
During this time, Messenia, which had not been a currant-growing region before, became the primary producer of low-quality currant raisins to be exported to France and made into raisin wine. By the end of the century, the southern coast of the Peloponnese had displaced the northern coast as the primary currant-cultivating region. From 1860 to 1887, the extent of currant vineyards in Messenia quintupled. Replicating the ascent of Patras in the first half of the nineteenth century, Kalamata grew at the end of the nineteenth century into a major currant-exporting port. In addition to silk, Kalamata became a major exporter of figs, currants, and eventually olives. In the 1880s, Kalamata joined Patras, Aigio, and Pirgos as one of the main currant-exporting ports in Greece.Finally, after World War I, as silk, currants, and figs declined in Messenia, the region switched to commercial oleiculture. Olives, of course, are a Mediterranean crop with a very long history. They grow all over the Mediterranean basin and, like figs, are very versatile, but only certain regions become specialist producers of olives. Messenia first specialized in olives in the fifteenth century, when the ports of Methoni and Koroni—and later Navarino—exported olive oil to French and Italian ports. In the nineteenth century, the Messenian olive oil trade relocated to Kalamata. It is unknown when the kalamon cultivar—now marketed as the Kalamata olive—was first cultivated, but the port of Kalamata grew with its growing popularity.During the so-called Second Industrial Revolution of 1870–1914, there was an increase in global demand for olives and olive oil to be used as industrial lubricant, in addition to their long-standing uses in soap manufacturing and as a food product. This growing demand caused olive cultivation to intensify in parts of Greece and the Ottoman Empire that already specialized on oleiculture, such as the islands of Crete and Lesvos. Messenia also felt the pull of this demand. In the last quarter of the nineteenth century, olive cultivation intensified in Messenia, but it was not until after the First World War that olive exports from Kalamata surpassed the export of figs and currants. In addition to its historical association with these four different commodities, Messenia is also interesting for the degree and the alacrity of the transformation of its landscape in the later nineteenth century. Messenia at the beginning of the nineteenth century was known for being a wilderness. With its narrow mountain passes and heavy vegetation, the landscape of Messenia also provided cover for outlaws, and as a result, the region was also notorious for banditry. In nineteenth-century travelogues, as the travelers are leaving Megalopolis, local officials warn them about the dangerous road south and tell them that they must travel with guards.Messenia is certainly not alone in this distinction, but it is notable. The climate and geology that made Messenia a good place for bandits to prey upon travelers also made the Messenian plain a difficult place for permanent settlement and yearround agriculture, despite its fertile soil. Notably, the Messenian plain is extremely wet. Located on the windward side of high mountains, it is in a rain excess zone, receiving 800–1000 mm annually. Messenia also has a geology that favors the formation of springs at lower elevations.Moreover, it was wetter in the recent past. From the middle of the sixteenth century to the middle of the nineteenth century, the Little Ice Age made the climate of Mediterranean Europe as a whole wetter overall.In the space of a few decades, foreign demand for currant raisins transformed the lowlying plains of the western coast of the Peloponnese. The landscape of orchards, marshes, pastures, uncultivated land, and diversified subsistence farms gave way to a vast extension of vineyards. The evidence from Greece’s nineteenth century argues for the transformative effects on the environment of incorporation into the world economy. The end of the Little Ice Age is not enough to explain swamp draining and lowland settlement in Greece. Without high global demand for Greek currants, permanent lowland settlement may not have occurred in Greece when it did, as there would have been no incentive to colonize the plains. Moreover, it must be taken into account that the process of lowland colonization for currant cultivation began before the end of the Little Ice Age because of demand from Britain. In addition, after the collapse of the currant economy in 1893, the process of lowland colonization was reversed, despite the more temperate climate. Agriculture contributes about a quarter of global greenhouse gas emissions, with approximately 14% directly from agricultural activities and 10% through clearing land to create new croplands and pastures . In many countries with intensified crop production, such as the United States , GHG emissions associated with soil and fertilizer management contribute to about half of the total agricultural emissions . Reducing these emissions is critical for limiting global warming to the Paris Agreement of 1.5 ◦C or 2.0 ◦C compared to preindustrial levels, and requires rapid adoption of multiple and coordinated solutions . Certain farming practices have the potential to reduce GHG emissions and/or increase soil carbon storage, and we define changes of GHG or soil carbon resulting from these farming practices as “agricultural carbon outcomes” in this paper.